At 6 a.m. on July 16, 1945, Maria Clemens, blind from birth, saw, for the first time in her life, a bright flash of light. Others in that desert area of south-central New Mexico saw it too. A farmer called to his wife that the sun was rising in the wrong place. For miles throughout New Mexico, windows shook and doors rattled. Later, army officials explained that an ammunition dump had blown up, causing strange lights to appear and the earth to shake.¹ Nearby scientists from the secret facility at Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was being created, along